• My Name Is Lucy Barton

  • A Novel
  • By: Elizabeth Strout
  • Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
  • Length: 4 hrs and 11 mins
  • 3.8 out of 5 stars (2,872 ratings)

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My Name Is Lucy Barton  By  cover art

My Name Is Lucy Barton

By: Elizabeth Strout
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
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Publisher's summary

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the tender relationship between mother and daughter in this extraordinary novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The New York Times Book Review • NPR • BookPage • LibraryReads • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.

Praise for My Name Is Lucy Barton

“A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”The Boston Globe

“It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one.”Newsday

“Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”—Lily King, The Washington Post

“An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—People

©2016 Elizabeth Strout (P)2016 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"This story of family, poverty, aspirations, and obstacles is immediately gripping, thanks to the combination of Strout's high-quality prose and Kimberly Farr's nearly flawless performance." (AudioFile)

What listeners say about My Name Is Lucy Barton

Average customer ratings
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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Meh!

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

What a disappointment. It seems unfinished. I don't think she spent a lot of time on this novel.

If you’ve listened to books by Elizabeth Strout before, how does this one compare?

"The Burgess Boys" and "Olive Kittredge" are two of my most favorite books. "My name is Lucy Barton" doesn't come close to the quality of those two books.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Not her usual

I've read all of her novels and collected short stories; I am a great admirer of her writing. This story I didn't care for. Far too much was left to the reader to surmise. The result, for me, was to find Lucy's parental affection impossible to believe .

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Not worth your time

I was surprised that this book would make it to the best seller list. From the beginning to the end it was pointless and boring. I kept waiting for it to get better but it just ended. This cannot be compared to her two other books

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Don’t consume unless very happy

This book was beautiful, but oh so depressing. It’s a complicated mother-daughter story, and it will make you feel a lot of despair.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Perfomed well

I haven't experienced any of Ms. Strout's other titles but I found this to be lackluster in both my empathy for the character and the writing. With shorter books, my expectation is that they move faster. If you like Stout's style (I mean, she did win a Pulitzer), female protagonists with mommy issues and don't mind a slower pace, you'll find this book entertaining, as so many people have.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

review

Narrator read well. book has clever presentation for an authenically touching story told by an author.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

real

thoughtful life reality expressed through known and unknown memories of a family's emotional journey .

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Beautiful

I’m so glad I listened to the positive reviews about this novel and disregarded the negative ones. If you are a daughter to a mother or a mother to a daughter, you will enjoy this little treasure. My takeaway? I am blessed to have the mama that I do and I can honestly say that this book helped me to appreciate our close relationship in a way that I hadn’t done before reading this. Our relationship is by no means perfect, and in most cases quite rocky, but it is ours and I am a better woman for it.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Will read every one of her stories

Being able to share these emotions in such depth while making the story one I couldn’t put down made me a high fan of this author. I’ll be looking forward to Lucy by The Sea.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Interesting diary of relationships

I enjoyed this book. Strout is quite skilled at writing unusual and unlikeable characters. Lucy's mother is not one you might generally care for. While narrated by Lucy herself, the reader really learns about her through her relationships with and observations of others.

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